Progress: the Katy Freeway in Houston, Texas, spans across 26 lanes making it the worlds widest. The freeway is broken down in to 12 main lanes (six in each direction), eight feeder lanes.
All of that, for a traffic jam. Imagine turning 4 lanes in a train track carrying 500 person every 5 min in both directions and one lane in a bike lane. It's still 20 lanes for car, but you suddenly have decent public transport which would be safer and faster than that gigantic traffic jam
Counting the service road is kind of cheating. In built up areas in Texas they're de facto city streets that happen to exactly mirror the freeway. They have intersections, lights, businesses, etc.
If I count the roads off the sides, on ramps and off ramps, etc, the highest I can get is 18 lanes. Is this the photo of where it’s 26 wide? I can’t seem to find it.
Fwiw, feeder lanes probably shouldn't be counted in Texas because they're basically glorified city streets. Businesses can have entrances and exits on frontage roads, so there's not really anything special about them except that they have a slightly higher speed limit (50~60mph vs 40~45mph) and they have immediate access to the highway.
I just came back from tokyo after doing the JR pass travel to view the entire country. I fucking HATE CAR TRAVEL. taking the Narita express to the airport was so painless. Got back to IAH bush Int'ctl and it was a complete clusterfuck trying to get an Uber. Not to mention it was quite literally twice the price the express line train was. And that was one of the more expensive limited expresses too.